How to Make a Toddler Sleepy by Wearing Them Out Before Bed

Problems with infant sleep are very typical.
But even toddlers and school-aged kids can develop poor sleep habits.
The big key to making kids more receptive to a regular bedtime is getting them to exert themselves during the day with games and activities.
Physical exercise deepens sleep and also relieves stress and frustration, which all toddlers certainly have.” It isn’t that exercise and exertion is a bedtime activity – Schneeberg recommends avoiding it in the hour before the bedtime ritual starts – but it can certainly help make bedtime easier.
How to Tire Out a Toddler Before Bed Active play that really engages the gross motor skills of a child can help make them weary by the end of the day.
It doesn’t have to be outside, but it does have to be exertion.
Exercise is not a bedtime activity; parents should avoid encouraging energetic play the last hour before the bedtime ritual starts.
The end must be clear, otherwise tired kids are going to keep pushing for parental interaction and miss the signals that parents are losing their patience.
In the Five Bs, the sound of the timer makes it pretty clear that parent-child interaction is over and it is time for sleep.
Instead, Schneeberg suggests, after the end of the bedtime ritual, parents should get really, really boring.

The big key to making kids more receptive to a regular bedtime is getting them to exert themselves during the day with games and activities. “It’s totally worth it to wear toddlers out before bedtime,” stresses clinical sleep psychologist Lynelle Schneeberg, a Fellow of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and an Assistant Clinical Professor at the Yale School of Medicine. “I think the best way to do this is to offer lots of outdoor play or any type of ‘large motor’ play. Physical exercise deepens sleep and also relieves stress and frustration, which all toddlers certainly have.”

It isn’t that exercise and exertion is a bedtime activity – Schneeberg recommends avoiding it in the hour before the bedtime ritual starts – but it can certainly help make bedtime easier. When kids exert themselves doesn’t necessarily dictate how weary they are unless they are still taking naps. The level of exertion, on the other hand, even hours before bedtime, can really exhaust kids. Swimming can be very draining, and usually, the pool is so much fun kids don’t notice. In order to capitalize on this end-of-day weariness, though, parents need to stick to the bedtime rituals that cue children into when bedtime has actually arrived.

How to Tire Out a Toddler…

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